Customer eXperience in Valparaíso hostels: Analyzing tourists’ opinions

Abstract

Customer eXperience is one of the key concepts in Service Science, an interdisciplinary research field oriented to the systematic innovation of services. The Tourist eXperience, as customer of specific services, is strongly related to the quality of the services that are offered. Online travel agencies generate online communities, where tourists can quantitatively (scores) and qualitatively (reviews) evaluate the services they received. Their opinions offer information for other fellow travelers when they are choosing tourism-related services. They also offer valuable information for decision makers in tourism entities. Tourist opinions express in fact their experiences as customers. Many researches focus on qualitative tourists’ comments, evaluating their reviews with big data and natural language processing techniques. However, we focused our work on quantitative data. The paper presents a quantitative study on the opinions of the tourists that used accommodation services offered through the online travel agency HostelWorld, in hostels from Valparaíso, Chile. We used descriptive statistics to analyze tourists’ profile, and inferential statistics to analyze tourists’ opinions.